'South Korean companies are sending employees on "fake funeral" courses to help prevent suicide. The "well-dying craze" has become an integral part of training at Samsung, which has built its own fake funeral centre'

In a time of credit crisis, small to medium bank branches are failing, forcing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to go in and clean up the mess. Coming in stealthily to avoid public panic and sudden withdrawal of all a bank’s funds, which would result in a sinking of the bank and possibly others in the area, the FDIC makes a quick job of taking over the bank.

Finally Got the News Saturday, June 28, 8pm, £0 The Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton St, Elephant & Castle, London SE17 Rare screening of documentary (dir. Steward Bird, Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner) on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, from wildcat movement to formidable independent workers organization, inside and outside the auto factories of insurgent turn-of-the-'70s Detroit.

Short article from Bahrain weekly 'The Gulf' in which the author of 'Super Imperialism' and 'Global Fracture' makes what is hardly the 'modest proposal' he pretends it is, and perhaps also gives a clue as to what he thought he was doing as 'economic adviser' to Denis Kucinich's presidential run. Hudson proposes that an unspecified bloc of 'Middle Eastern' state-capital should try to settle the dollar-standard blackmail once and for all by offering to buy the US out of the military infrastructure (i.e.

Thanks to Meltdown III stalwart Jon Amsden for finding and introducing this impressionistic but telling survey of what a dollar free-falling towards worthlessness ('Monopoly money', anyone?) means in terms of everyday survival in some parts of the world.

For those who may wish to take a break from the lofty abstractions of financial skullduggery and dollar decline, here's how it looks on the fishmarket floor and in other places where the dollar was once the basic currency of international trade but is now losing its former luster.

Overview of the maoist victory in the Nepalese Constitutent Assembly election by long-term observer and sympathiser Gary Leupp, a US academic and regular Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) contributor.  It's not necessary to agree with Leupp that the maoists stand for 'communism' to recognize that the election result represents a major strategic success for the provisionally demilitarized 'people's war' and a geopolitical upheaval at the borders of India (where the Naxalite maoists continue to wage war) and China.  More open to question, perhaps, is Leupp's claim that the event is o

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote: